Sam Harnett

Sam Harnett is a reporter and producer who contributes regularly to The World, Marketplace, and KQED. He is the creator of Driving With Strangers, a podcast of stories told to a rideshare driver, and a co-founder of Blocsocks, a marketplace for Bulgarian women to sell their wool socks abroad.

He's reported on subjects from tech issues to the environment to the aftermath of the Fukushima tsunami.

The US citizenship has an amazingly high pass rate — but it also has a number of critics. They argue the questions, frankly, are bad. And the test doesn't encourage immigrants to become better citizens, but rather to memorize facts they can write on the test.

At some level, all countries push new citizens to integrate and that's where civics and language citizenship tests come in. But when you take a longer look at how citizenship exams are developed worldwide, you realize they can have less to do with methodology than promoting a strict cultural identity.

There’s a new front opening in the effort to pump oil out of Canada’s tar sands. Plans to build pipelines to the south to the Gulf of Mexico and to the west to the Pacific Ocean are in question. Now TransCanada wants to head east from Alberta to refineries on the Atlantic.

El Nuevo South. That's how some refer to the recent influx of Latinos to places like South Carolina, Arkansas, and Georgia. The changing demographic has sparked racial tensions. But the city of Dalton, in northwest Georgia, has a different story.